The House approved Tuesday spending an additional $37 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, overcoming the opposition of some Democrats who have concluded that the Afghan conflict is un-winnable.

The funding bill, which passed 308 to 114, had stalled for two months as a growing number of Democratic lawmakers objected to the continuation of the war in Afghanistan and insisted that spending on the conflicts be accompanied by funding for domestic initiatives, to help Americans suffering from the recession. The domestic funding was stripped from the final bill.

The legislation was passed by the Senate last week in a voice vote, and it now goes to President Obama for his signature.

The disclosure Sunday of more than 91,000 secret documents about the war had little impact on the debate; most of the 102 Democrats who voted against the funding had already expressed doubts about the war in Afghanistan and Obama’s decision last December to add 30,000 troops there. They were joined by 12 Republicans.

The number of Democrats who opposed the funding was more than double the number who voted down a similar measure last year, illustrating the growing divide between Obama and members of his party about Afghanistan.

‘What has changed in […]

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When you hear the Republicans talk about fiscal responsibility, you should really just laugh in their faces. Consider this:

A US federal watchdog has criticised the US military for failing to account properly for billions of dollars it received to help rebuild Iraq. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the US Department of Defence is unable to account properly for 96% of the [$9.1 billion allocated for Iraqi reconstruction]. Out of just over $9bn (£5.8bn), $8.7bn is unaccounted for, the inspector says. […]

The funds in question were administered by the US Department of Defence between 2004 and 2007, and were earmarked for reconstruction projects. But, the report says, a lack of proper accounting makes it impossible to say exactly what happened to most of the money.

When liberals say that Republicans use the federal treasury for looting, this is what we mean. Maybe you object to spending tax money on hunger or health care for kids. Maybe you don’t want blacks and latinos to get a helping hand from the federal government. But how do you feel about the Department of Defense losing track of 8.7 billion dollars? We gave them over […]

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Owners of Apple Inc.’s iPhone can unlock the device to use applications not authorized by the company, the U.S. Library of Congress said.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington added the practice, described in the ruling as ‘jailbreaking,

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In an unprecedented development, close to 92,000 classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan have been leaked. SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have analyzed the raft of mostly classified documents. The war logs expose the true scale of the Western military deployment — and the problems beleaguering Germany’s Bundeswehr in the Hindu Kush.

A total of 91,731 reports from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan are to be made publicly available on the Internet. Never before has it been possible to compare the reality on the battlefield in such a detailed manner with what the US Army propaganda machinery is propagating. WikiLeaks plans to post the documents, most of which are classified, on its website.

Britain’s Guardian, the New York Times and Spiegel have all vetted the material and compared the data with independent reports. All three media sources have concluded that the documents are authentic and provide an unvarnished image of the war in Afghanistan — from the perspective of the soldiers who are fighting it.

The reports, from troops engaged in the ongoing combat, were tersely summarized and quickly dispatched. For the most part, they originate from sergeants — but some have been […]

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The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and ‘free trade’ that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the ‘global economy’ would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Here are the statistics to prove it:

* 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 […]

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